SECOND WONDER
THE HANGING GARDENS OF BABYLON
All the rest of that day Rachel went about feeling excited and happy. It was not till next morning when she woke that doubt crept into her mind. Could she really have been to Egypt and seen the great Pyramid of Cheops before it was quite finished? Surely, she couldn’t really have talked to Sheshà, the priest of that ancient king! It must, of course, have been a dream. Yet how had she managed to go to sleep in the British Museum? And how was it, if she had dreamt the whole adventure, that she remembered everything distinctly, and not in the confused fashion of an ordinary dream? Rachel was puzzled, but she was obliged to come to the sad conclusion that somehow or other the glowing pictures in her mind, of slaves, of Pharaoh in his chariot, of the room within the Pyramid holding the sarcophagus, were, as her old nurse used to say, “all imagination.”
It was a terribly disappointing thought, and for the whole of the following day she felt quite dull and miserable, especially as Aunt Hester wouldn’t hear of another immediate visit to the British Museum.
“It’s too far,” she declared. “You may go next week. But I can’t think why you’re so anxious about it. Miss Moore says you didn’t seem particularly interested while you were there.”
Rachel couldn’t of course tell Aunt Hester that in her longing for the British Museum, there was a faint hope that if by any chance the adventure had been “real”—there, if anywhere, “something might happen.”
A few mornings afterwards, however, something did happen. At breakfast time Aunt Hester put down a letter she had been reading, and looked across at her niece.
“Old Mr. Sheston is coming to lunch,” she remarked. “He says he thinks he must have seen you the other day. He knew you from your likeness to your father.”
“Who is old Mr. Sheston?” asked Rachel, looking up from putting more sugar on her porridge.
Aunt Hester smiled. “He’s a funny old man who has been a friend of our family for years, and knew your father as a boy. He is doing some important work at the British Museum, so you’ll be able to talk to him about it.”